This was England's darkest hour

Bemoaning the inadequacies of Steve McClaren is an empty exercise: a second grade coach without credentials, he should never have been appointed. The anxiety of Wednesday evening was the poverty of the players.

Of the six darkest seasons for the English side since the Second World War, this was the worst. We knew that the standard of English players was declining, and now a Croatia team of relatively unheralded talents exposed the true extent.

Forget the false bravado of an alleged 'golden age', believed by some players and some of the media. Steven Gerrard and company were seen as no more than pewter when judged alongside mercurial Luka Modric and his colleagues.

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The previous five moments of despair, recognised as turning points and all but one in the World Cup, carried an identifiable, reassuring silver lining: England might have been rubbed out, but players were there who, optimistically, might paint a brighter picture another day.

In all of these it was possible to put forward an explanation, if not an acceptable excuse. Rank bad luck in 1950. Tactical naivety, plus technically superior opposition in 1953-54. Freak opposing goalkeeper's performance in 1973. Grossly ill-judged selection in 1976. Confusion in tactics and selection in 1993.

These last errors were also a severe denunciation of McClaren on Wednesday, but the humiliation was that the manager's lack of wisdom - sentencing an inexperienced goalkeeper to a nightmare Wembley baptism - was compounded by the shortcomings of all the players.

Consider the past. When Walter Winterbottom took a squad to Brazil devoid of serious preparation, and they squandered 20 chances when losing to a scratch American team on a cows' meadow, England had many wizards, such as Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews, Stan Mortensen and Wilf Mannion, yearning for organisation in the future.

There was still an absence of serious team cohesion when England met Olympic champions Hungary twice in eight months three years later.

England had sufficient naturally gifted players to give tolerable, if less than spectacular performances under Winterbottom in the World Cups of 1954, '58 and '62, twice reaching the quarter-finals before going out to glittering opposition from Uruguay and Brazil.

The quality of organisation, as much as the inspiration from Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton, lifted the trophy in 1966. By the time England were required to qualify for 1974, Ramsey had turned further away from instinctive talent, still present within the England game, towards physical resilience.

Even so, England's elimination by Poland in a 1-1 draw owed as much to exceptional goalkeeping as to Ramsey's poor use of substitutions, and there was still talent available in the likes of Colin Bell, Martin Peters and Allan Clarke.

When Don Revie took charge, skills to match central Europeans and South Americans were there in players such as Kevin Keegan, and Trevor Francis. Yet blundering, incessant changes in selection and tactics by Revie never really gave England the chance to find continuity.

If Graham Taylor's comparable fluctuation in the Nineties was an echo of Revie, the raw material was in decline, notwithstanding the presence of Paul Gascoigne and Alan Shearer. The regime of McClaren has brought descent to its ultimate: no cohesion, endlessly altered tactical systems - 4-5-1 against Croatia for heaven's sake - and the realisation that Gerrard, Frank Lampard and the rest are internationally second division.